Paint The Town: How Vancouver Mural Festival Is Transforming Vancouver

In a few short years, the Vancouver Mural Festival (VMF) has transformed the city through its vibrant art, community-driven activities, and focus on reconciliation, diversity and inclusion. It is Vancouver’s largest free public art celebration and the festival uses art to express the diverse fabric of Vancouver’s culture while leaving a legacy for years to come. This year is exceptionally notable, because for the first time in the festival’s history, all the headlining artists are women. VMF has intentionally chosen an all-female lineup as a way to recognize women, as street and graffiti art have historically been a male-dominated space.

While events have been running all week, the festival will reach its peak on Saturday, August 11^th with live mural paintings, community activities, street parties, a beer garden and several concerts.

As VMF continues to grow the impact and scale of their festival, they are looking for partners who share the same belief in the power of art to transform a city. TORQUE Strategies was engaged by Vancouver Mural Festival to provide recommendations on how their sponsorship strategy could garner greater success in market.

THE OBJECTIVE:
Provide VMF with a partnership narrative and architecture to propel their growth and align with their vision of using art to transform the city of Vancouver.

THE PROCESS:
TORQUE conducted in depth interviews with the festival founders in order to learn more about the Festival’s values, vision, and the mural art world at large. We also completed a comprehensive landscape study looking into other successful mural festivals to gauge best practices and opportunities as well as integrated relevant consumer information.

THE OUTCOME:
TORQUE crafted a narrative that would engage and attract corporate partners, while building a partnership architecture and themes that would enable the sponsorship sales process to be more effective and values-driven.

Members of the TORQUE team experienced the VMF energy for themselves, when they volunteered to assist with the festival earlier this week. It was very rewarding to see the mural festival in full circle by painting the murals themselves and seeing it in action. Stop by Mount Pleasant to take in the spectacular views for yourself!